Satellite communication systems may be susceptible to various types of service disruption, such as that caused by, for example, rain fade attenuation. The higher frequencies used in modern high throughput satellite systems may be more attenuated by rain than are lower frequencies used in other systems. For example, rain attenuation may be more severe at Ka-band or V-band than at L-band or C-band. Rain fade at a satellite ground station, or gateway, may reduce service availability for users in user spot beam sets served by that gateway. This may be partially mitigated, for example, through application of adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) techniques, which may apply robust modulation and/or coding when necessary to overcome atmospheric effects. This may provide improved link availability at the cost of reduced link capacity. Uplink power control (ULPC) systems may also be provided at a gateway's RF Terminal (RFT) to compensate for uplink attenuation by increasing uplink transmit power, and larger antennas may be provided in the RFT to compensate for both uplink and downlink attenuation. The provision of large antennas and amplifiers may be expensive, and even when coupled with ACM, may not provide the target service availability for sufficiently rainy gateway sites.
RF diversity may be used to remedy service interruptions. Some or all of the equipment at a first gateway site may be replicated at a second RF diversity gateway site within the same gateway spot beam as the first gateway site. To allow this, the gateway spot beam must be sufficiently large that the RF diversity gateway site can be established far enough away from the first gateway site so as to likely be out of the rain fade when the first gateway site suffers from rain fade, depending on the direction and size of typical storms in that area. A larger gateway spot beam may provide reduced availability and capacity of the gateway uplink and downlink for a fixed gateway antenna size, due to the broader focus of the gateway spot beam at the satellite. There may be limited infrastructure access that makes it difficult to find a cost-effective site for an RF diversity gateway within the gateway spot beam, due to lack of facilities, power, terrestrial communication access, staffing, security, and so on. For high capacity satellite systems that employ many gateway spot beams, the use of RF diversity gateways may result in an RF diversity gateway being replicated in each gateway spot beam where necessary to achieve the targeted service availability, resulting in considerable capital and operating costs for RF diversity sites.